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I think we saw with the ILECs in the 90's that unbundling doesn't work unless the infrastructure company can't provide any services on top of that infrastructure. Otherwise there is too much incentive to shift costs and play games with other service providers, favoring your services in subtle and not-so-subtle ways. And they will still need to be regulated like a utility. It does allow a company to incrementally build competing infrastructure, but it's debatable whether that is an efficient allocation of resources.

If you look at Comcast's income statement for 2013, you'll see rising profits. They made 6.816 billion dollars in 2013. I find it disingenuous (fucking bullshit) for them to claim these content providers are costing them money.

In reality it is likely the opposite, the content providers are increasing the demand for their product and allowing Comcast to charge more for service. Their relation to content providers is somewhat like Apple's relation to App providers.

Except Apple doesn't make 97% margins (it's no longer break-even, but it is way, way less than 30%).

This is exactly what would happen if we'd given UPS a monopoly on all the roads. Would anyone be surprised that they started charging FedEx more? So why is anyone surprised by this? The solution is the same one we've used with roads: public infrastructure (municipal/public-utility fiber) that any company can build on top of.

I suspect that this is because cable and internet phone service are very high-margin, while internet service is not.

No, it's quite the opposite. Once you're making 97% margins on your Internet customers and have no competition, why in the hell would you put any money in to it? You're going to have a hard time finding any ROI.

As long as ISPs are not allowed to intentionally degrade non-premium traffic on the back of direct-peering deals, I see no fundamental problem with it.

Non-premium traffic with be de-facto downgraded, because even if they don't actively do it, large monopoly ISPs will be incentivized to make non-premium traffic as unreliable as possible. So whether it is simply slashing the capital budget of non-premium infrastructure or not performing repairs in a timely manner or a hundred other small things, non-premium traffic has to suffer. How long before there are multiple tiers of premium traffic? The monopoly ISPs face no competition or regulation; now they simply have to figure out how to maximize their rents.

Still wrong battle. Franchises are simply agreements to use a city's rights-of-way. They've been non-exclusive since 1992. The problem is that building wireline infrastructure is extremely capital expensive and has severely diminishing returns in areas that are already saturated by a competitor. Your business plan is to sink a bunch of capital into a business and then compete on price with a company that has no capital costs? Good luck raising the billions you'll need for that.

No, the solution here is municipal fiber networks that are managed as public utilities that sell wholesale to ISPs. Just like how we have multiple shipping companies that use public infrastructure to transport packages between customers. Then you can have as many different competitors as the market will bear with as many different business plans. In that situation, the Comcast-Netflix deal would never have happened, because the competing ISPs would have been begging Netflix to install hardware in their data centers to make their customers' experience as good as possible. An ISP trying to make Netflix slower would have lost every customer that cares about Netflix (which apparently is a lot of them).

FTFA: "IPTV is digital television delivered through a high speed Internet connection, instead of by the traditional cable method." They are talking about FiOS and Google Fiber (which is why people who read it also noticed a reference to a comment from a Google). Don't worry, grandpa, the guvmint isn't coming to take away your Internets.

Yeah, the problem is that if you sell them at $75, you've now set the price expectation for all Surfaces going forward. What could Microsoft possibly do to justify selling a Surface 2 at $199? And that is taking a huge loss on any kind of decent tablet. The estimates for Apple's bill of materials on a $499 iPad is about $300 (remember, that doesn't include R&D and other costs) and they have the best supply chain in the world. Microsoft can't go below their current $349 if they ever plan on being successful in this market and even that is setting them up for failure.

How did this get marked insightful!? I'm pretty sure the Mormon Police aren't real and if they are, I have no special insight into them. It was a Simpsons joke. I guess season 9 was before the moderator's time. Instead of making me feel insightful, your moderation has made me feel old.

Trivial. The Mormon Police just have the bank send all of those people a bogus prize certificate for a free motor boat and then when they show up to get their boat, the Mormon Police arrest them and beat them to the full extent of the law.

Plain vanilla DVI (DVI-D) just requires a simple $5-$30 adapter on Macs. You're talking about dual link DVI (DVI-DL).
Apple's mini DisplayPort is really a Dual-mode DisplayPort (DP++), which allows backwards compatability with DVI/HDMI. Basically, the port is able to use the same pins it uses to send DisplayPort to instead send DVI/HDMI, which then just requires a passive adapter to rearrange the pins in the correct order. Apple's Thunderbolt port maintains that backwards compatibility. However, due to the limitations of using a DisplayPort socket to do this, it is limited to single link DVI-D, which maxes out at a resolution of 1920x1200 @ 60hz.

To use higher resolutions, you need an active converter that takes the actual DisplayPort signal and converts it into DVI/HDMI. That is why it costs ~$100 (whether from Apple or someone else) and why it requires power; it is actual processing the signal and translating it into the other protocol, not simply switching wires around. You would also need it for simple single link DVI is your DisplayPort where not a DP++ port.
Hope that makes things clearer.